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This story begins four years ago when I moved to Northern Virginia. October
2003, I was handed my orders to report to the National Guard Bureau in
Arlington, VA. It was then that I began my long trip from Washington State to
Washington D.C. After arriving to a new and very different city, I began to
meet some great friends. The only problem with my new found company was
that we went out every single night. Whether it was drinking or eating, we
managed to find every restaurant and bar in the area. I was young and single
at the time and did not care about my health. Shortly after moving out to VA,
I was introduced to a beautiful blond haired girl. In about six month time we
fell in love and got engaged. It hit me when we got our engagement photos
back from the photographer. My face looked like 250 pounds of chewed up
bubblegum. I was not happy with myself. I could not believe that I would let
myself go like that. So I decided that I was going to make a change.
I started lifting and running again, but it just was not cutting the pounds
and shaping my body. My wife told me about a program, P90, that she used
in college. I was skeptical of working out with a video. I felt like that was a
woman thing and that men belonged in the gym with the other men. She
convinced me and we both started the program to prepare for our wedding
on May 27th 2006. I started the video 90 days before the wedding and saw
great results. I went from 220 pounds down to 184. The wedding was great
and I never felt better about my body.
Then in October of 2006 I was asked to deploy to Afghanistan with an
Embedded Training Team to the Afghanistan Army. Immediately after finding
out I would be gone for the next 15 months, the drinking and eating started
all over again. I made excuses for not working out. I was mobilized on
January 2nd 2007 to FT Riley, Kansas for three months of training before we
would deploy to Afghanistan. Every opportunity we were given we would use
to go to the local restaurants and bars. The pounds started creeping back on.
Finally, the day came for me to fly to Afghanistan on April 10, 2007.
The turn around point finally came when my team chief in Afghanistan
wanted to hold a contest to see who would lose the most weight during the
year we were over here. So, the day that we all weighed in I weighed in at
202 pounds. I called my wife later that night and asked her if she could send
me the workout and description sheets to a program she had bought, P90X. I
thought I would give it a try here in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. There was one
challenge, there was no gym yet. There was a building, where the future gym
was to be, with a scale inside and a pull up bar outside. Being very
determined and wanting this weight off, I knew I would have to start the
program without the gym. It was May 21st, 2007 when I started P90X.
Before the gym was built, I used sandbags for weights, the pull up bar
outside and the work out sheets with the description manual. Within two
weeks I was able to use the new gym. The gym had weights from 5 to 100
pounds and a little room off to the side that I could do plyometrics, yoga,
kenpo, and my absolute favorite, core synergistic based off the manual. My
wife decided that she would send me the DVDs so that I could watch the
videos and make sure I was doing everything correctly. Since it did not always
say how many reps or how long to do an exercise on the description sheets, I
realized after watching the DVD’s that I was doing a lot of exercises wrong,
or even sometimes doing too many reps. Once I sat down and watched all of
the DVDs, the program made too much sense. The weeks went by and the
pounds started to come off.
The biggest challenge with using the P90X program in Afghanistan was
the diet. I did not have a choice on what I could eat for breakfast, lunch and
dinner. All I could do was make sure I was consuming enough protein. I tried
not to eat the fried or fatty foods, but it was hard when that was all they
served some days. Most days I had to peel the fried part off of the chicken
before I ate it or would just resort to eating a green salad. It was also hard to
workout every day. Almost weekly, I would be called on a mission that would
require me to be gone for a day or two. When I was able to get back to the
gym, I would do doubles. It was not fun and it was very hard to push my tired
body. But, I was dedicated to the program and nothing was going to stand in
my way of finishing it.
The weeks and months flew by. I finished my first round of P90X on the
19th of August 2007. My before and after pictures were truly amazing. I went
from 202 lbs to 178 lbs. My waist went from a 35 to a 30. I went from 18%
body fat to 7%. When I started this I could only do 5 pull ups and now I can
do 30. I sent my pictures home to my wife so she could see the results and
she was amazed. She was so amazed she printed them off and took them to
her class that she teaches at her gym. Of course everyone wanted to know
what the heck it was that I did to achieve those types of results. No one could
believe that my body had changed that much in only 90 days.
I am currently in the 9th month of my deployment here in Afghanistan. I
will be returning home sometime in late March or early April. I have just
finished my second round of P90X and I now weigh 173 pounds. I have not
had a chance to check my body fat but I can tell from my after pictures I have
lost some more body fat. I have never been this chiseled in my whole life. I
am getting ready to start my third round of P90X on the 26th of November
2007. I started with one other Soldier starting the program with me, and now
I will have five other Soldiers starting with me. I cannot thank Beach Body and
my man Tony enough. THANK YOU!!!!!! Thank you for such a great workout
and for changing my life. I will never go back to the 202 lbs of chewed up
bubble gum that I was.